Playing TADS 3 web UI games on mobile devices

Did someone have any luck playing the web version of a TADS game on mobile devices? I tried with an iPhone (iOS 10.3.2) under both Safari and Chrome, but IFDB didn’t propose a link to play online, which looks like an indication that IFDB detects an incompatibility. If I get the link to play online via a desktop computer and email it to myself to open it on my iPhone, I can launch the game but the UI behaves so strangely that it’s unplayable.

I tried a few games, including Return to Ditch Day, just to be sure it wasn’t a single particular game that was misbehaving.

I was wondering if others had better luck, or if there is a fundamental incompatibility between TADS’s web UI and iOS. That would be strange however as presumably the client layer is fairly thin (since the game engine runs on a server) and can’t involve hugely sophisticated technology.

I’d have a look myself, if I weren’t almost totally ignorant about web programming…

Me too. On my iphone I observe some strange behaviour regarding scrolling and positioning of the grey bar, sometimes covering game output. WebUI is composed of iframes which are resized according to screen size and there seems to be a problem with this.

Hi,

I have been running tads games on my iPad with the Frotz app which works great.

Also on android phone with the thunderword experimental app.

Both in the app stores for the relevant devices.

I used Dropbox to copy the tads .t3 files onto the devices.

On iPad select export, then open with then choose copy to frotz.

On android save the file into my downloads folder and thunderword finds it to play.

Anyway thought I would mention this incase people were not aware of these mobile interpreters.

Regards,
Anthony

Yes, the support of text-only games on mobile devices (and elsewhere) is quite fine. The multimedia support, though, is a bit more limited than for Inform games, and this includes hyperlinks. Any game that would attempt to make itself accessible to parser-averse players by exposing commands via hyperlinks therefore currently seems limited to desktop platforms.

I believe there is nothing unfixable about mobile support of web-based games, though, as this is all presumably just a matter of tweaking the client-side JavaScript layer of the game. It’s just that it’s beyond my skills to even start looking into this. But as long as you stick to traditional text-only parser games you’re fine.